My 3 visits to Israel

It's 1998 and I'm 15, visiting with my parents. The Wye River Memorandum is being signed as we travel, and a relative says he thinks Netanyahu could have talked it over a bit better. "Better for the Jews?" I ask incredulous. "Do you think I'm interested in the Arabs?" he says.

A relative is driving us somewhere and we go past a village that the driver identifies as an Arab village. He starts talking about how they have it very good here: they don't pay any taxes, earn good money and so can build themselves very nice houses. Fresh off my first few years of Holocaust education, I'm genuinely shocked that someone can talk so closely to the way Jews would have been talked about.

We visit another relative who lives in a West Bank settlement. "The Palestinians are a made-up nation!" he says. It's important to him that a 15 year old boy he'll never see again knows this. "During the war of 48 there were Arabs coming here from as far as Iraq". During some dead time I idly flip through some Russian language magazines he has on the coffee table. They speak of what will happen during the [Jewish] messianic end times, that when the call comes, people must be ready to leave their house immediately, without even gathering their things, to participate in the final. A definite Alex Jones vibe.

It's 2011 and I'm visiting Israel by myself at the end of a trip through Central Asia. I fly from Istanbul and at the gate see a member of staff questioning a woman with a Palestinian Authority passport. He's not sure if she will be let in at Ben Gurion, she departed from Amman in Jordan. He calls Ben Gurion and they say that she needs to go back through Amman too. I'm eavesdropping but it seems the rest of the people at the gate are oblivious. When it's time to board the plane I'm hesitant; I'm on a sightseeing and family visit trip and I'm fine but she can't return home. But what could I change here, right?

At Ben Gurion I know there will be questions because I've just been to Iran and have a stamp to prove it, and indeed the employee at the counter says to another "we have a Jew who's been to Iran!". I get pulled into the waiting room for the interviews. I might be the only Jew there but it's as racially diverse as you'd expect. A woman talks to me, askoing what would have happened to me if they found out that I was Jewish. Does she mean like the 8000 Jews living in Iran? I don't say that. Did I meet anyone from the government? What ties do I have to the Jewish community? They finally let me through to meet my relative who was waiting so long he asked a member of staff what might have happened to me. "Oh, they probably arrested him," she said breezily.

"Do they have roads in Iran?" a relative asks. I'm not sure how I would have travelled across the country but I indulge him. "Yes they do".

A relative asks if I really was against the idea of Iran doing a nuclear strike on Israel: "Of course every person's against a nuclear war but aren't you worried about it?" This is a year before Netanyahu's Iran bomb infographic speech at the UN. To my relative it's as clear as day that Iran is about to get a nuclear bomb and about to strike Israel.

She also makes sure to tell me: "Palestinians aren't human. A human mother feels love towards her child but a Palestinian mother sends her child happily to be a suicide bomber."

I go on a daytrip to Zichron Yaakov with another relative. It's up on the hills so we catch the bus from the train station in Binyamina. When we get off the bus, she says "that was unpleasant, the driver was an Arab". I didn't notice such a thing but I remember my grandfather, before he became more Zio-pilled, after a visit to Israel saying "for all the squabbles I can't really tell the Israelis and the Arabs apart".

It's 2023 and I'm visiting with my wife for a relative's wedding. At the counter I'm told "you will have to wait again". It's a new passport without an Iran stamp but of course they know now to operate a database. In a kindness they let my wife wait with me even though her passport was Iran-free. This time the interrogation is much more intense. The interviewer wants to trip me up, to catch me in some lie. He asks me where I work. He suddenly starts screaming "why don't you give me something useful?". I answer and immediately he's calm and says ok. Is this some neurolinguistic programming/"advanced" interrogation technique? How do they imagine it working? Things have really escalated, especially since I'm a Jew who's supposed to have access to the Law of Return! A friend later tells me her friend had his leg broken in the interrogation and was deported. Extrapolating how things have changed in just 2 years since my last visit I realise I can't really go again even if I wanted to.

We're in the resort city of Eilat with some relatives. At dinner one of them mentions Umm Al-Rashrash, the old Arabic name for the city. "Well I don't think we have to go into that," another relative says.

We're at our relative's house, about to be taken to the airport to leave. He mentions that there's tragic news, a beloved rabbi fell asleep at the wheel just before a checkpoint to get back to his home in the West Bank and so was instantly shot dead by the soldiers manning the checkpoint. "You're saying it's a tragedy but you're also saying you think the soldiers did the right thing, according to the correct IDF protocol?"

"Of course."